THE CHOCOLATE you buy this Mother’s Day could come from cocoa farmed by slaves.

Americans will spend tens of millions of dollars on chocolate this week – unaware that the beans used to make it are grown on farms where children are forced to work unpaid and under horrific conditions.

About 40 percent of cocoa products imported by U.S. manufacturers comes from the Ivory Coast, where agricultural slavery and child trafficking is widespread.

Chocolate makers say they’re struggling to combat evil practices on plantations that supply their cocoa. But it’s a losing battle.

“We consider this practice terrible and inhumane,” said Susan Smith, vice president of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, which represents Hershey, M&M, Nestlé, Guitard and Barry Callebaut.

“We have contacted people at the State Department and UNICEF, and we are working with International Cocoa Producers to eliminate this practice.”

Ivory Coast cocoa beans are world renowned for their high quality, and some chocolate manufacturers, such as Godiva, even make a special promotional point of importing their beans from there.

Children are brought to the cocoa plantations from their homes, thousands of miles away in Mali, Burkina Faso and Benin. They are forced to work long hours caring for and harvesting cocoa trees and are abused and beaten if they try to escape.

The government of Benin has complained that 15,000 of its children are enslaved on Ivory Coast farms and homes.

SPEARHEADING the fight against the shameful trafficking is veteran New York politician Carol Bellamy, now executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund.

A report from one of her UNICEF investigators in the Ivory Coast says the traffic in children in the West African nation is “scandalous.”

Children in their mid-teens work up to 17 hours a day in fields, are poorly fed, and some are locked in cages at night.

After the harvest, they spend more backbreaking days clearing fields of trees and scrub to create more farmland for cocoa. Many of them have only the vaguest idea where they are, so escape is unlikely and reaching home virtually impossible.

“Payment is generally made at the end of the harvest, very often not to the child, but to the trafficker,” the UNICEF report says.

“The child’s work load is dictated by the agricultural calendar. Children are assigned a variety of tasks depending on the needs of the moment.

“It is hard to determine how many such children there are, because we do not know how many farming operations there are in the region, and therefore have no way of calculating the number of children involved.”

Filmmakers Brian Woods and Kate Blewett investigated slavery in the Ivory Coast for a British TV documentary last year. They found dozens of teenage boys who worked as slaves and were abused and badly beaten for trying to escape.

Woods claims that 90 percent of the farms in the Ivory Coast use slaves. If that figure is correct, half the world’s supply of chocolate is in some degree harvested using slavery.

That number is hotly denied by the African nation’s diplomats, whose agriculture would be wiped out by a boycott of its cocoa, cotton or coffee. But although diplomats called the figure “wildly inaccurate,” no one denies slavery exists.

“We demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that slavery is widely practiced on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast,” Woods said. “Sadly, there has been little follow up on our findings.”

FORMER coffee and cocoa trader Philip van der Pohl, who now lives in Cape Town, told The Post, “The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of small holdings growing cocoa beans and coffee. No one knows what happens on many of these places, which are comparatively small.”

Smith said part of the problem is the difficulty of monitoring conditions on farms.

“There are lots of cocoa farms and plantations and there are lots of different supply levels,” she said. “What we have pledged to do is work with a number of partners and international organizations to determine the extent of the problem and eliminate the practice.

“Most of the cocoa is grown on small family farms, and we were not aware that there are potentially any problems. We don’t want to ever be purchasing from farms that employ this horrific practice.”

Denise Farrell, a spokeswoman for Godiva Chocolatier, said the company has a long-standing policy that requires all suppliers to be in compliance with labor laws and regulations.

“Any supplier found not to be in compliance with child-labor laws will need to change their practices,” she said. “We are aware of the reports from West Africa. We condemn slavery and child labor, and we have been assured by our suppliers that there is no slavery associated with them.”

Mike Kinney, spokesman for Hershey Foods, said manufacturers are trying to combat the problem.

“The chocolate industry is working with the U.S. government and West African governments to conduct a thorough investigation,” he said. “Our goal is to determine the extent of [the problem], and then bring to bear whatever resources are necessary to eliminate the practice.

“We strongly condemn it wherever it exists. If there is a single farm with a single child involved in this, then that’s one too many.”